Synopsis

At dusk in the countryside, a silent old man drags half a rotting cow carcass along the only dirt road toward a storage hut in the middle of the fields. He hauls it inside and lays it beside the pile of decayed animal bodies already there, cuts flesh and organs into an old iron bucket with a shovel, then carries the bucket through dense corn to pour the thick corpse fluid at the roots of a strange plant with a forked stem. He also picks up a lightly decayed dead mouse and tosses it onto the pile. After nightfall he paints a ring of corpse blood on the earthen floor and, eyes closed, begins an incantation. Green corpse-fire and black-green ectoplasm fill the shed; the corpses twitch and swell but stay whole. At the final beat every body ashes at once and dissolves into smoke. Pale spirit mist bursts from the seams of the hut, and one larger, hornless cow soul alone flies low along the field rows and enters the plant's roots. Energy climbs the stem, and the fruit at the top pulses exactly once. At dawn the old man wakes on the floor to a complete, healthy hornless dairy cow licking his hand. A kitten, a puppy and a piglet cross the threshold one by one, each at its own pace. He rests his hand against the cow's face and smiles, very slightly. In the end credits a fallen fruit splits open, a healthy young mouse crawls out and runs away, and the camera returns to the cornfield and the small hut. For its first fifty-seven shots the film makes the audience believe the old man is poisoning farmland, hoarding corpse material, trapping souls and building an evil thing. Only when the resurrected cow licks him awake is every cold action before it reinterpreted.

Project members

• DirectorWentao Liu